In the emails I received inviting me to the shindig, I thought it was going to be something along the line of "we want to thank you all for listening, have a drink and here is a t-shirt." Turns out that the Pandora.com get-together was nothing of the sort. I did get a t-shirt, but they have some really interesting stuff that hit the Web tonight and more due in the weeks to come.

The audience was mainly filled with Pandora's rabid listeners from the San Francisco Bay Area. Like competitor Last.fm, Pandora.com is a site that streams music to listeners, based upon their preferences. On average, each Pandora listener there tunes into to Pandora.com around 18 hours a week, listening to an average of 15 stations each. This was a Pandora.com-positive group, to say the least.

The night started with Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora.com and the Music Genome Project, talking about the history of Pandora, current user listening habits and taking questions from the audience. Pandora has hosted about 75 town-hall style meetings throughout the country to talk to their more rabid listeners to see how the listening experience can be improved. What made tonight interesting was what chief technical officer Tom Conrad had to say after Tim was done.

Tom talked about a secret project that Pandora was working that started about one year ago, "The Pandora Everywhere Platform." The Pandora Everywhere Platform will be able to move Pandora off the desktop and deliver your favorite music to any device, using any network, using any music format.

The first announcement was Pandora in the Home. Partnering with Sonos, listeners will be able to stream music to any room in the house. Listeners will also be able to create zones for different musical tastes: blues in the kitchen, R&B in the den and punk in the garage. Pandora in the Home is available now with a free 30-day trial, after which users must pay $36 a year. Free software upgrade to all Sonos customers.

Next up was Pandora on the Go. Pandora's future includes all mobile devices, Conrad said, but what is available now is a partnership with Sprint. For an extra $3 a month Sprint users can stream all their Pandora stations to their phone. As of Tuesday night, Pandora.com will be available on 5 Sprint phones and by the end of June will be available on all Sprint Power Vision phones.

What does the future hold? WiMAX. Pandora has partnered with Zing on what is, for now, a Wi-Fi enabled MP3 device. The device is being dsigned for what many consider to be the future of WiFi: municipal WiFi and WiMAX.

All in all, a very interesting night for this Pandora.com listener. No mention of the pending fight in Congress to save 'Net radio, but the night really wasn't about that fight. Instead, it was about how Pandora.com could expand its listenership and the versatility it offered and would offer its listeners.